Genuinely broad in scope, each handbook in this series provides a complete state-of-the-field overview of a major sub-discipline within language study, law, education and psychological science research.
Genuinely broad in scope, each handbook in this series provides a complete state-of-the-field overview of a major sub-discipline within language study, law, education and psychological science research.
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The best method to fight myths and legends about biological and cultural evolution of primate species is through interdisciplinary studies and discussions. One of the myths the author can find in archaeology and paleoanthropology manuals is the one related to the Homo faber concept. It would be strange that, facing similar ecological conditions, forest hominids had renounced the advantages of the instrumental behavior only because of being pre-humans. This instrumental behavior could have been even more frequent than in the case of chimpanzees, given the advantages of bipedalism (in the forest as in savannah) for manipulating and transporting tools. He thinks that the generalization about the first lithic industries as being a consequence of a higher intelligence in the human genus should be qualified and contrasted with the paleoecological conditions of East Africa during the Plio-Pleistocene. This chapter talks about when hominids started making camps at ground level.
Psychology seemed to be condemned to be always searching for an object. This chapter devotes to the presentation of a résumé of Peirce's semiotic logic. The psychological status of the interpretant is dependent of the semiosis to which it belongs. The experience examined in the chapter is an enactive experience, it is the experience that presents the world, it is the experience that results from alive movement that produces the development of an agent and its change into actor. At the same time that the environment becomes intelligible, changes into a meaningful Umwelt where the organism learns what to do, so that its behavior follows a rationale. It is the kind of experience that exist before communication and language comes to the scenery. The chapter dwells on how movement turns in action, and the latter into actuations, so that meaningful objects, situations and the lived Umwelt can appear.
A person using a symbolic resource is a person using a novel, a film, a picture, a song, or a ritual, to address an unfamiliar situation in her everyday life. This chapter sketches the historical background of the notion of symbolic resource, and highlights its potential for socio-cultural psychology. It gives a model for the analysis of uses of symbolic resources. The chapter shows how symbolic resources participate to psychological development because of their mediation of three basic psychological processes: intentionality, inscription in time, and distancing. It explains that the symbolic systems and artefacts have as major property the fact that they encapsulate human meaning and experience; people are constantly striving for meaning, especially in moments of change. However, it appears that social sciences are still unable to account for how cultural tools participate in people's personal meaning making, and emotional elaboration as part of psychic transformation.
This chapter disentangles experience, beliefs, consciousness, and the real by producing a narrative essay about the natural history of their evolution. It examines how communication in hierarchically organized groups offers the possibility for the production of conventional symbols, and so opens the path for humanization. The chapter then explores how conventional symbols come to appear, so that a subjective representation of situations can be taken to be real. The chapter describes the examination of how beliefs develop from dramatic actuations within a social Umwelt. Actuations are a product of the combination of actions that have a semiotic structure, and so produce understanding. The teleonomic character of action-semiosis, actuations and scripts for performing, makes the actor to accumulate resources (scripts) to face new situations. The chapter shows that reality makes itself apparent in consciousness through experiences, and these are as much a result of these encounters as to how psyche works.
This chapter examines the concept of communication traditionally and currently used in the field of ethology. It describes a few landmarks in the evolution of communication in the different species, paying particular on the mechanisms that regulate these features since this is where the levels of progressive complexity of processing are found. The different modalities of communication have evolved to serve the general function of regulating the (social) behavior of each species within its own ecological niche. The emergence of birds and mammals was accompanied by a reorganization of perceptive systems, which were for the first-time centralized in the brain. The chapter focuses on communication in primates, and in particular the anthropoids, since these animals make use of forms of communication very close to those of humans. Finally, the chapter focuses on describes the sign created by the hominid mind in order to facilitate communication between minds.
Socio-cultural psychology is widely known as a theory and research field that stresses the determinant role of social interaction and culture in the development of the higher psychological functions. This chapter presents a view of the human subject that avoided dualism (mind-body, individual-social, physical-symbolic) and was capable of bridging the gap between the basic psychological processes and the higher processes involving consciousness and meaning. It describes the reorganization of dynamic systems as a key concept for the description and explanation of perception and movement. The main claim is that the kind of explanation including self-organization and temporal dynamics applied to the development of perception and action may be useful for the explanation of how socialization and enculturation processes develop. The chapter explores the concept of re-mediation, and the practices from it derived, which are one of the privileged arenas where basic psychological processes and socio-cultural phenomena have historically intersected.